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. . . as I was pondering at whether or not I have the wits about me to write this, I was skimming some of my recent entries, and fetched up against "Learn all your senses". Um, yeah. I'd forgotten I got poked in the eye with that the other day. Synchronisity continues . . .
We began the workshop, once everyone had gotten in there, with a round-the-circle naming and one to three words to describe what we were there for, or what we were hoping for, or something like that. I was about two thirds of the way around the circle so I had a while to think, and spent some time trying to figure out if I had anything profound to say, whether "curious" might be a useful word, and that sort of thing.
What I wound up saying was "Set sent me."
I'm still imperfectly reconciled to this process; I still have the recon ideal of the pure reconstruction in my head, things done as the ancients did them, combined with the ancients' love of continuity and repetition, even when I'm dissatisfied with some aspects of what the ancients did and frustrated by the gaps in my knowledge. (Especially the gaps where the domovoi and their kin sit and wait for me to figure out how to invite them in.) But as I said when we went around the circle again, what I'm taking away is synthesis -- this process of doing the Kemetic work and the Feri work and the thing that is both and neither. Whatever it is. I still don't know what I'm doing. (Mine is not to see the way. Argh.)
I met a number of people and talked with them -- by chance I wound up sitting next to the Egyptophile I'd been talking to on the chat list, so that was tidy, and we chatted a fair bit. I didn't retain most of the names; there's a huge pile of faces rattling around without any clear memories of them. Names are a special case of noun, huh?
Fractals. I was talking to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
leafshimmer (the Egyptophile in question) about fractals, and about Mom's work back in her painting-with-a-hose period. Because he'd mentioned that every time he read Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition with a little more knowledge, a little more training, he saw more layers in it, more knowledge. Which of course meant I muttered, "Born-men like fractal patterns" and wound up talking about Cyteen with ninevrise later. It all makes sense, really, there's the usual sort of continuity to it. (It makes sense to meeee.)
(No, I'm not writing with any sort of temporal continuity just now. I said inchoate, I bloody meant inchoate.)
I don't know that I've assimilated the knowledge well enough to talk about what we learned coherently. The techniques, I mean. We did Ha Prayer, and Kala Rite / Rite of Unbinding (in two different ways, at that), and a number of trance workings. I told Thorn about the Sacred Falcon revelation. She told me that I needed to look up an e. e. cummings poem (this is probably unrelated to the Falcon, except that it's what came up next in the brain mish-mash).
One of the things that I need to develop skill in is the capacity to trance. I suspect this of being a dissociative-spectrum thing, that's meant that I've never tranced well -- I envy people who can go into these journeyings and come out with clear visuals and senses and information. It's a skill I arguably need to have as a mystic, I'll probably need it if I'm going to learn to horse properly. My trance meditations through the workshop were deeply erratic in depth and quality -- several of them I'm not sure how much was me feeling there needed to be something there and manufacturing it.
Then there were the exceptions.
One bit of the Three Cauldrons meditation (Cauldron of Warming, Cauldron of Vocation, Cauldron of Inspiration; I need to look up more of this so I can get more of what's going on there; alternately, I could consider the fact that I got nothing coherent out of the Cauldron of Vocation part of this related to the fact that I drew the HIgh Priestess inverted as my explanatory card for it . . .): The Cauldron of Warming is solid, rough, probably iron though I didn't see the material well, it wasn't smooth, it was that sort of pebbly-rough that some sorts of cast iron get, though, and about two-thirds full of molten silver. That was cold -- oddly enough still molten, but cold. Because it didn't have its own fire, it was taken off the fire and isn't circulating. I drew clarifying cards for that block and got the Three of Swords. (Which had me staring at it a lot and muttering "Tell me something I don't know already, huh?") (Three of Swords: pain, grief, betrayal, end of a relationship, all that good stuff.)
The Sufi-inspired drop of water into the sea meditation: Up became irrelevant. I wasn't at the surface of the sea, I'm pretty sure, but there was no sense of upness, just the incredible depths and breadths of the space below. I don't have the words here, just . . . space and darkness. Perhaps a touch of vertigo, but only the sort that comes of the awareness of downness. (I've been up towers with glass floors and stood out in the center of the glass to look down below. I did that when I went to Toronto with the RM Madrigals. I don't think Wendolyn went out into the center, though. But that sort of vertigo, not the teetery sort.)
The first time we did God-Soul meditation was . . . I got myself settled. The meditation started at a still place down in the belly, and stretched the energy up the spine and into the space of the God-Soul. And that was fine, and comfortable, and my back wasn't hurting at the time so there was no real distraction, and then Thorn said something about the God-Soul as a hood. The energy . . . changed. It stretched up into a huge cobra -- with the sort of perspective shift that goes with a genie sliding out of a lamp, the hugeness dwindling down into the teeny-tiny living space, but still bigness. The cobra stood up over my head, and its head was wider than my skull, almost as wide as my shoulders, and it stretched up, I can't tell how far, the perspective was funky, two or three feet or ten miles, I have no idea. And then it dwindled down, all to the same scale, its body about the thickness of my spine, resting along my spine, running its cool body up the back of my neck, over the top of my skull, and settling to rest on my forehead, its head, normal-sized now, rearing up still. And every time I breathed in, I could feel the ripple of the serpent's muscles running up my spine, it was resting along my spine instead of being the energy through the spine and it moved exactly like a snake, felt exactly like Kunda does winding around my arms, only it didn't care about gravity. And every time I breathed out, the ripples ran the other way, still just like a snake. Just like a real snake, cool and reptile and resting along the length of my spine and perched on my forehead.
I'm still kinda wigged out about that, by the way.
We did meditations and trance states for the other souls, too; the result I got from the Sticky One produced a lot of pastel fingerprints and a birdie. Some people got some very profound stuff; I got "Fingerprints are cool!" The automatic writing I did for Shining Body produced a bunch of stuff I need to chew on that concluded "Remember to breathe."
Um, yeah.
"Who is the flower above me, and what is the work of this god? I would know myself in all my parts." The answer I got to "What is the work of this god?" when we asked it in the final working is "Hands and wings." One of the other bits of vivid somethingness, whatever that something may be.
We sang Rumi,ibnfirnas, we sang "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." I can't escape the Sufis, mutant or otherwise.
Kheperu.
Meanwhile, my mother is going into the hospital tomorrow for a lumpectomy. If anyone has any spare goodthoughts, I'd appreciate a transmission; for all that that relationship is strained . . . y'know. Thingy.
We began the workshop, once everyone had gotten in there, with a round-the-circle naming and one to three words to describe what we were there for, or what we were hoping for, or something like that. I was about two thirds of the way around the circle so I had a while to think, and spent some time trying to figure out if I had anything profound to say, whether "curious" might be a useful word, and that sort of thing.
What I wound up saying was "Set sent me."
I'm still imperfectly reconciled to this process; I still have the recon ideal of the pure reconstruction in my head, things done as the ancients did them, combined with the ancients' love of continuity and repetition, even when I'm dissatisfied with some aspects of what the ancients did and frustrated by the gaps in my knowledge. (Especially the gaps where the domovoi and their kin sit and wait for me to figure out how to invite them in.) But as I said when we went around the circle again, what I'm taking away is synthesis -- this process of doing the Kemetic work and the Feri work and the thing that is both and neither. Whatever it is. I still don't know what I'm doing. (Mine is not to see the way. Argh.)
I met a number of people and talked with them -- by chance I wound up sitting next to the Egyptophile I'd been talking to on the chat list, so that was tidy, and we chatted a fair bit. I didn't retain most of the names; there's a huge pile of faces rattling around without any clear memories of them. Names are a special case of noun, huh?
Fractals. I was talking to
leafshimmer (the Egyptophile in question) about fractals, and about Mom's work back in her painting-with-a-hose period. Because he'd mentioned that every time he read Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition with a little more knowledge, a little more training, he saw more layers in it, more knowledge. Which of course meant I muttered, "Born-men like fractal patterns" and wound up talking about Cyteen with ninevrise later. It all makes sense, really, there's the usual sort of continuity to it. (It makes sense to meeee.)(No, I'm not writing with any sort of temporal continuity just now. I said inchoate, I bloody meant inchoate.)
I don't know that I've assimilated the knowledge well enough to talk about what we learned coherently. The techniques, I mean. We did Ha Prayer, and Kala Rite / Rite of Unbinding (in two different ways, at that), and a number of trance workings. I told Thorn about the Sacred Falcon revelation. She told me that I needed to look up an e. e. cummings poem (this is probably unrelated to the Falcon, except that it's what came up next in the brain mish-mash).
One of the things that I need to develop skill in is the capacity to trance. I suspect this of being a dissociative-spectrum thing, that's meant that I've never tranced well -- I envy people who can go into these journeyings and come out with clear visuals and senses and information. It's a skill I arguably need to have as a mystic, I'll probably need it if I'm going to learn to horse properly. My trance meditations through the workshop were deeply erratic in depth and quality -- several of them I'm not sure how much was me feeling there needed to be something there and manufacturing it.
Then there were the exceptions.
One bit of the Three Cauldrons meditation (Cauldron of Warming, Cauldron of Vocation, Cauldron of Inspiration; I need to look up more of this so I can get more of what's going on there; alternately, I could consider the fact that I got nothing coherent out of the Cauldron of Vocation part of this related to the fact that I drew the HIgh Priestess inverted as my explanatory card for it . . .): The Cauldron of Warming is solid, rough, probably iron though I didn't see the material well, it wasn't smooth, it was that sort of pebbly-rough that some sorts of cast iron get, though, and about two-thirds full of molten silver. That was cold -- oddly enough still molten, but cold. Because it didn't have its own fire, it was taken off the fire and isn't circulating. I drew clarifying cards for that block and got the Three of Swords. (Which had me staring at it a lot and muttering "Tell me something I don't know already, huh?") (Three of Swords: pain, grief, betrayal, end of a relationship, all that good stuff.)
The Sufi-inspired drop of water into the sea meditation: Up became irrelevant. I wasn't at the surface of the sea, I'm pretty sure, but there was no sense of upness, just the incredible depths and breadths of the space below. I don't have the words here, just . . . space and darkness. Perhaps a touch of vertigo, but only the sort that comes of the awareness of downness. (I've been up towers with glass floors and stood out in the center of the glass to look down below. I did that when I went to Toronto with the RM Madrigals. I don't think Wendolyn went out into the center, though. But that sort of vertigo, not the teetery sort.)
The first time we did God-Soul meditation was . . . I got myself settled. The meditation started at a still place down in the belly, and stretched the energy up the spine and into the space of the God-Soul. And that was fine, and comfortable, and my back wasn't hurting at the time so there was no real distraction, and then Thorn said something about the God-Soul as a hood. The energy . . . changed. It stretched up into a huge cobra -- with the sort of perspective shift that goes with a genie sliding out of a lamp, the hugeness dwindling down into the teeny-tiny living space, but still bigness. The cobra stood up over my head, and its head was wider than my skull, almost as wide as my shoulders, and it stretched up, I can't tell how far, the perspective was funky, two or three feet or ten miles, I have no idea. And then it dwindled down, all to the same scale, its body about the thickness of my spine, resting along my spine, running its cool body up the back of my neck, over the top of my skull, and settling to rest on my forehead, its head, normal-sized now, rearing up still. And every time I breathed in, I could feel the ripple of the serpent's muscles running up my spine, it was resting along my spine instead of being the energy through the spine and it moved exactly like a snake, felt exactly like Kunda does winding around my arms, only it didn't care about gravity. And every time I breathed out, the ripples ran the other way, still just like a snake. Just like a real snake, cool and reptile and resting along the length of my spine and perched on my forehead.
I'm still kinda wigged out about that, by the way.
We did meditations and trance states for the other souls, too; the result I got from the Sticky One produced a lot of pastel fingerprints and a birdie. Some people got some very profound stuff; I got "Fingerprints are cool!" The automatic writing I did for Shining Body produced a bunch of stuff I need to chew on that concluded "Remember to breathe."
Um, yeah.
"Who is the flower above me, and what is the work of this god? I would know myself in all my parts." The answer I got to "What is the work of this god?" when we asked it in the final working is "Hands and wings." One of the other bits of vivid somethingness, whatever that something may be.
We sang Rumi,
ibnfirnas, we sang "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." I can't escape the Sufis, mutant or otherwise.Kheperu.
Meanwhile, my mother is going into the hospital tomorrow for a lumpectomy. If anyone has any spare goodthoughts, I'd appreciate a transmission; for all that that relationship is strained . . . y'know. Thingy.
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From:
no subject
I hope all goes well, both for your mother and for you.
From:
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Good thoughts to your mother and her body.
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on the trance side: I am *so* not a visual learner, so visual trance stuff is always weird for me. It's gotten easier as I've learned to hook into other senses first (touch, distance from stuff, size, feel under my feet, etc.) On the other hand, I pay *real* attention to the strong visuals, because they're the stuff I normally don't get.
Just throwing this out there.
It sounds fascinating. Go you for going!
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I look forward to future discussions!
Shimmer
From:
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The mortality of one's parent's is an alarming thing, though it should be obvious it is not.
My mother has breast cancer while I was in college. She is well now, though one breast short. I wish your mother good health returning as well.
From:
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The problem with metaphysical profundity is subsequently finding sufficient time to dissect and comprehend.
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Hey, were you in Madrigals? *has many warm fuzzy memories of being in Mads*
Your experiences at the workshop are fascinating for me to read, especially since you're the only person I know who has any real familiarity with Feri. Your snake meditation in particular is amazing.
Meanwhile, my mother is going into the hospital tomorrow for a lumpectomy. If anyone has any spare goodthoughts, I'd appreciate a transmission; for all that that relationship is strained . . . y'know. Thingy.
I understand, and your mother is in my prayers. Hoping all goes well.
From:
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The snake meditation was . . . really, really trippy. I'm still not through processing through it. It hasn't happened again when I've done that particular meditation, which is probably good for my sanity. (That or I'm blocking it on some level, which would be a bad thing. I can't figure out how to know that yet, though.)
From:
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Good Thoughts for your mother on the way.
From:
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The workshop sounds absolutely fascinating! I wonder if she will do one in the DC area?
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I'll add your mother to my prayers, hon
From:
Offers
I learned about faith and spirituality from a lot of sources, many of them not church approved. The majority of what makes my faith, and my rituals, and me was found in the woods, in books, in dance, in storms and moving water.
But a hefty percentage of the rest came from my grandparents.
And I'm so fucking angry at them. It is bleeding into my faith, into the center of who I am. I never really thought of what my dad did as wrong, you know? He was just. . . daddy. And that was the way it was. But what my grandparents did. That was betrayal. That was hypocracy. That was wrong.
The voice in the back of my head is back, telling me that I deserved it, that the universe is a fair and balanced place and if it happened, well then there is the proof.
Dearheart, I'm sorry for putting this into your journal, in the comments. But this is apparently where it wanted to come out, and right now I'm just not up to. . . .
Anyway. In regards to your mother, my thoughts are with you, and her. While I don't belive anyone can honestly say they understand the emotions of another, I /do/ know how it felt for me when my father was having his first surgery to remove the tumor. *offers holds*
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From:
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I hope all went well with your mother. I'll keep reading, and if you're still wanting prayers, they're on the way.